Information extraction (IE) is an emerging science that refers to adding structure (e.g., indexes or annotations) to unstructured data, especially unstructured text. IE commonly uses various types of natural-language-processing methods such as semantic analysis, term-weighting approaches, term recognition, indexing, etc. Data analysis and data mining are methods for extracting useful knowledge from data. When the data is unstructured, it is extremely difficult to analyze or mine successfully. Therefore, IE is a critical preprocessing step in data analysis or data mining of such data, for example, quality-related text data in a manufacturing environment.